It’s Important to Relax

People are not the only ones who need to learn how to relax. Training animals to relax is an important part of promoting their healthy, well adjusted, and peaceful lives. Most relaxation training starts with conditioning a particular posture or behavior that represents a relaxed state in that species. This can be done using any of the six basic operant techniques but is very successful in a free shaping, scan and capture scenario. Initially the smallest unit of relaxation is conditioned and then this is incrementally extended for longer and longer periods of time.

With time, animals who originally may have resisted, will learn to appreciate relaxation for its own sake much like the process of learning to meditate for human beings.